Bainbridge Island Review

Limited government should be our aim | LETTER TO THE EDITOR

August 4, 2013 · 9:45 AM Comments

To the editor:

Here we go again. The controversy over raising the nation’s debt limit.

Rather than cutting spending as we ought to do, we will instead be deluged with political pundits in most major news media venues who will say that we as a nation can spend our way into prosperity. Nonsense. The true engine of prosperity is savings at both the individual and government levels. It is well past time for America to come to its senses and declare, “no more welfare, no more warfare.”

The nation needs to hearken to the words of George Washington in his “Farewell Address,” read at the beginning of every session of Congress:

“As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible … avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt… not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear… The execution of these maxims belong to your representatives; but it is necessary that public opinion should cooperate.”

In order for public opinion to “cooperate” it must undergo a paradigm shift. We must reawaken to the concept of “limited government” that America’s founders wrote into the Constitution. We must get away from the thought that government is entitled to engage in what the 19th century French statesman, Frederic Bastiat, called “legal plunder” which he defined as: “See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”

If we, as a nation, were to put into effect the heart and soul of what Bastiat wrote in his “The Law” we would greatly calm and close the divide between left and right, liberal and conservative, and truly become one nation with liberty and justice for all.